Art
criticism…develops and grows…with the development…of the philosophy of art.[1]

René Wellek once perceptively observed that the superior critic knows what he is
assuming. Using the terminology developed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions.[2]it
could furthermore be said that the superior critic is fully paradigmatic. Kuhn’s
well known research suggests that proper science, and by implication any other professional
practice, is marked by its working with a well defined paradigm. In Kuhn, “paradigm”
is essentially a three-dimensional concept, marked by i) clear, consistent and appropriate perceptual
categories through which to view the world, ii) a well defined set of puzzles to solve
or questions deemed worth asking, and iii) established, agreed upon procedures
to answer them. Underlying any paradigm
is a set of assumptions—the assumptions that Wellek demands the critic be aware
of. While there may be no evidence that
Greenberg was aware of Kuhn, he was nonetheless the paradigmatic critic par
excellence, and he took great pains to ensure that his critical practice
was founded on selected principles drawn from his reading in leading
philosophers of art, most especially Immanuel Kant, Benedetto Croce, and R.G.
Collingwood.

Greenberg made no claim to be professionally involved
with philosophy and in fact described his aesthetics as “home-made,” but he was
forthright about both his sources and the assumptions he made on the nature of
art and of critical judgment. He stands head-and-shoulders above less
paradigmatic critics, some of whom he rather intemperately criticized in “How
Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name.”[3]
It has not been sufficiently noted that Greenberg’s paradigm changed over time
and that the Greenberg most often discussed and so widely criticized is a later
and much more narrow Greenberg that of the 1940s. This paper outlines the
paradigm practiced by the later Greenberg, suggests four major weaknesses in
his aesthetics, and argues that they are responsible for some of the lacunae in
his criticism.

Greenberg’s governing perceptual categories

It is commonly observed, both by historians and
Greenberg himself, that Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), or
at least “Analytic of the Beautiful,” is a major source for Greenberg. Here
Greenberg goes straight to the heart of the matter, for Harold Osborne, like so
many others, thinks of the Critique of Judgment as “still the most
important single work in modern aesthetics.”[4]
Kant rejected views that had been fairly common up to his time or just before,
in particular, that art has a specifiable end or purpose—for instance that the
importance of art lies in mimesis (truth to nature), or in its being capable of
instructing and elevating. That is, in Kant’s predecessors art was often
defined in terms of instrumental values. Kant brushed such views aside and
placed art in its own category separate from function. In Kant’s view, the
aesthetic is one of three separate domains of human experience equal in
dignity, if not importance, to the theoretical (or cognitive) on the one hand
and the practical (including moral) on the other. Greenberg’s focus on art as
art, his insistence on its autonomy, and his disdain for functional claims for
art all trace back to Kant’s aesthetics, which he first examined “really
closely, in ‘41 or ‘42”[5]
and which over time took an increasingly central position in Greenberg’s
aesthetics.

But Greenberg’s
perceptions of art and the art world were also governed in part by a later
adumbration of Kant’s philosophy, outlined by British philosopher R. G.
Collingwood in The Principles of Art (1938), an annotated copy of which
Greenberg retained in his library in his later years. Collingwood provided a
taxonomy of art and pseudo-art experiences, separating art proper from six
other experiences: amusement, “magic,” puzzle, instruction, propaganda, and
exhortation. His criterion for differentiating them was the ends-means
distinction, arguing, “These various kinds of pseudo-art are in reality kinds
of use to which art may be put,”[6]
so that the six pseudo-arts were all examples of extra-artistic “craft” in
which the ends/means distinction does apply: the end is fully specifiable, and
the means to achieve it can be reached by reason. The function of amusement,
for instance, was defined as the deliberate arousal of feelings the audience is
familiar with and likes to have. Simple “thrillers” would be an example, and
the “crudest and most brutal”[7]
kind of amusement is pornography.

These distinctions lie
behind Greenberg’s celebrated article, “Modernist Painting” (1961), where he
postulates that a pressing danger made advanced artists in mid-19th
century want to purify their art of any extra-artistic aspects. That danger was
“leveling-down” - the demands of the art establishment and the mass art
audience for titillation, reassurance and escape; that is, the arts “looked as
though they were going to be assimilated to entertainment pure and simple,”[8]
and Greenberg, like Collingwood, had the utmost disdain for entertainment or,
as Collingwood puts it, the “pseudo-art” of amusement.

Cabanel’s titillating Birth
of Venus (1863), the most popular picture of the Salon of 1863, purchased
by Napoleon III, would be a case in point, as would E.J.H. Vernet’s Joseph’s
Coat (1853), where its glowing colours and resplendent finery offered
distraction from the grey surroundings of northern Europe in the throes of
industrial revolution.

Collingwood also
influenced Greenberg in his assumption that art “explains to us what we already
feel, but it does not do so discursively or rationally.”[9]
This is an idea central to Collingwood’s philosophy of art and quoted in both
Rubenfeld’s biography[10]
and Donald Kuspit’s 1979 book on Greenberg but otherwise seldom noted in
commentary on Greenberg’s aesthetics. To be fair to Greenberg’s critics, it
should be noted that This Collingwoodian assumption is not often so explicit in
Greenberg. To Collingwood, art is a kind of eureka! experience:

Until
a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what emotion it is. The
act of expressing it is therefore an exploration of his own emotions.... the
end is not something foreseen and preconceived, to which appropriate means can
be thought out...[11]

For Greenberg, the experience of art is
invariably linked to the experience of quality. Perhaps this conviction owes
not so much to any aesthetician as to the painter, Hans Hofmann, who wrote, “art
may be taught only upon the basis of a highly developed sensitivity for
quality.”[12]
For Greenberg an essential feature of artistic quality was established by Kant
in the Second Moment of “Analytic of the Beautiful” (“On the Judgment of Taste
as to Quantity,” sections 6-9). There Kant argues that the disinterested pleasure
of the Beautiful is a universal one—“universal” is the key concept of the
Second Moment—“grounded in [what one] can also presuppose in everyone else.”[13]
Taste that is not barbaric is a kind of sensus communis (section 20 of “Analytic
of the Beautiful” and also section 40 of “Analytic of the Sublime”), i.e., a
universal faculty. While each individual may have his or her own sensuous taste—liking
or disliking particular colours, for instance (section 7)—Kant postulates that
aesthetic judgments of reflective taste “could... be considered valid for
everyone” (section 8). As Kant observes, we demand this agreement. If others
judge art differently, we deny that they have “taste,” assuming that “common
validity” to judgments of our reflective taste. He concludes that while the
experience of beauty is completely “free” (“favour is the only free
satisfaction”—section 5), it is nonetheless a “necessary” one that “could
demand universal assent” (section 22). Greenberg takes all this for granted,
citing Kant’s comment that the viewer acts “in accord with humanity.”[14]
Thus if Olitski is good for Greenberg with his educated and practiced eye, he
should be good for everyone. His most emphatic argument along these lines was
in “Can Taste Be Objective,” where he claimed to have superseded Kant in the
understanding of this issue. Greenberg acknowledges that “Kant believed in the
objectivity of taste as a principle or potential,” but to him this is a “failure”
on Kant’s part. [15]
Greenberg concluded that “the consensus of taste makes itself a fact, and makes
the objectivity of taste a fact—an enduring fact.”[16]

Then there is
Greenberg’s penchant for examining visual relations. That would have been
confirmed for him by the Third Moment, where Kant observes that with artistic
painting and music, “The charm of colors or the agreeable tones of instruments
can be added, but drawing in the former and composition in the latter
constitute the proper object of the pure judgment of taste” (section 14). This
is a distinction that has become standard, whatever the writer’s vocabulary,
e.g., John Hospers’ distinguishing between the elements of aesthetic surface,
e.g., “colors or sounds taken singly,” and aesthetic form.[17]

Greenberg’s inclination
to focus on form would be re-enforced by the Third Moment (“of judgments of
taste, concerning the relation of the ends that are taken into
consideration in them”, sections 10-17), which argues that works of art seem to
be designed, but they are designed for no purpose (“without an end”) except our
apprehension, our perceiving and experiencing them; they are “purposive” rather
than purposeful (section 10). “Purposive” is the key concept of the Third
Moment. Thus “the judgment of taste has nothing but the form of the
purposiveness of an object (or the way of representing it) as its ground”
(section 11).

Greenberg’s focus on
form would be even more supported by Croce. In his Aesthetic, knowledge
has two forms, a logical one from the intellect and an intuitive or imaginative
one, including perception. That is, intuition is knowledge free from concepts.
Expression, emotional valence, is an inseparable part of intuition. Therefore
any distinction between form and “content” is false. Unlike Kant, Croce ties
feeling in from the outset of his analysis. In art “feeling is a feeling that
is formed, and form is a form that is felt.”[18]
Again, Greenberg has an imprimatur to focus on form, to the neglect of any
analysis of feeling, even though he had written an article entitled “‘Feeling
Is All’.”[19]
So, as much as he objected to the term “formalist,”[20]
Greenberg’s eye was consistently on form.

The questions Greenberg deems worth
asking

Donald
Kuspit has argued that Greenberg “totalizes”
judgment,[21]
and certainly questions of relative quality in art are central to his
criticism. For Greenberg, the nature of this question was established by Kant.

In the First Moment of “Analytic
of the Beautiful” (“Of the Judgment of Taste as to Quality” - sections 1-5) Kant tells us that
aesthetic judgment is neither “cognitive” nor “logical” (section one) and which
applies when we ask — properly— whether something is beautiful. Putting
the question properly means we want to know “how we judge it in mere
contemplation” (section 2), i.e., for its “aesthetic” beauty of form, which
provides pleasure of its own specific kind. This assumption recurs in Croce
when he demands that we ask when something gives us pleasure “whether that
pleasure is an aesthetic pleasure.”[22]

Kuspit notwithstanding, Greenberg does ask other,
important questions consistent with his aesthetics: how tensions are
established and resolved in works of art (he has a supreme talent for that),
how artists place themselves within tradition and relate to their influences,
and so on.

The later Greenberg’s
paradigm should be defined also in terms of his rejected questions, and those
are often influenced by Kant also. The First Moment specifies that the pleasure art
gives is a “disinterested” pleasure—disinterestedness is the key concept of the
First Moment—that does not depend on any appetitive interest, for instance an
appetitive interest in the subject of the artist. “Taste is the faculty for
judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or
dissatisfaction without any interest. “The object of such a satisfaction is called
beautiful” (end of section 5). Greenberg has no interest in iconography, and
his relative lack of interest in the subject would seem confirmed by the First
Moment.

Most notably, the later
Greenberg was determined not to discuss “content” directly. He believed content
is so locked up in form that it remains “indefinable, unparaphraseable,
undiscussable.”[23]
Indeed, “The unspecifiability of its ‘content’ is what constitutes art as art.”[24]
If by “content” Greenberg meant the affective charge of the work of art,
perhaps he could take comfort in this self-denying ordinance from Kant’s
observation that “Taste is always still barbaric when it needs the additions of
charms and emotions for satisfaction, let alone if it makes these into the
standard for its approval.” (Third Moment, section 13).

In the Fourth Moment
(sections 18-22) Kant advances the argument about the universal nature of art.
He says that the beautiful “is regarded as an example of a universal rule that
one cannot produce” (section 18). Greenberg would not have known Guyer’s
translation published after the death of the critic and was probably more
familiar with that by Walter Cerf: “...exemplifying a universal rule one cannot
state.” Section 18 can be read as consistent with Greenberg’s belief that art
must be deeply felt, but the critic should not attempt to say what is felt: “one
cannot state.” [25]

The later Greenberg also
rejected any efforts to understand the genesis of art, its root in the persona
of the artist, and his or her sources of creativity: “there’s nothing to be
said about inspiration—it’s a mystery.”[26]

On the basis of his
aesthetics, and of personal inclination also, Greenberg deliberately limited
the range of his critical enquiry. As we shall see, that was not always the
case.

The
procedures Greenberg uses to answer those questions

“Complaints of an Art Critic” (1967) is
Greenberg’s most forthright explanation of how he practices aesthetic judgment.
To him, “Esthetic judgments are immediate, intuitive, undeliberate,
involuntary,” rather than rational. They happen to the critic through
his “ungovernable taste,” are ‘received, not taken,”[27]
and he owes his readers good faith in reporting them. Thus there are no rules
for judging art, and there are no fully specifiable criteria to apply, for they
are “hidden from consciousness, unobservable,”[28]
although there may be some general desiderata with at best an open-textured
definition, i.e., recurrent grounds for supporting aesthetic judgments already
achieved, such as “hard-won unity.” The operative basis for judgment is the
felt response of the critic—his primary datum[29]—and
the reference point is the agreed upon masterpieces of the past.

Greenberg’s method again
owes to Kant, to his understanding that artistic judgments are based on feeling
and cannot be proven. Kant tied his notion of the beautiful to what he calls
feelings of pleasure (as opposed to displeasure): I favour (like) it; I don’t
favour (like) it. These feelings have nothing to do with cognition, with what
we know. We don’t reason them out. Kant asserts, “There can be no objective
rule of taste that would determine what is beautiful though concepts” and to
seek a “universal criterion .... is a fruitless undertaking” (section 17). The
Third Moment, then, supports Greenberg’s principle of No Criteria (“esthetic
judgments can’t be proven... or really even argued.”[30])
Croce does the same: “every work has its own particular law.”[31]
Greenberg’s practice in the studio, where he would often produce artistic
judgments after the first glance at a work, was calculated to render judgment “immediate,”
bring intuition to the fore and preclude any role for reason in reaching his
judgments.

The strengths of Greenberg’s aesthetics

Clearly Greenberg profited enormously from his
unusually thorough immersion in the thought of Kant, Croce and Collingwood. It
saved him from a number of possible critical errors, e.g., Wimsatt and
Beardsley’s well known Affective
Fallacy and Intentional Fallacy.[32]
It provided him with considerable rigour in separating non-aesthetic pleasures
from aesthetic ones. Having a better command of aesthetics than his
contemporaries, he was emboldened to be a firm upholder of quality—a kind of
Superego of the art world — although he was widely condemned for being too
exceptious in his criticisms. Leo Steinberg, in particular, complained, “I
dislike their interdictory stance ... prohibitive function.”[33]
This is ironic, given Greenberg’s insistence that “Good taste is catholic
taste. Good taste likes anything that’s good and dislikes anything that’s bad.”[34]

One of the greatest
positive consequences of his aesthetic position was that Greenberg gained
enormous focus on visual syntax and was encouraged to become the brilliantly
perceptive eye that he was, although his brief study with Hofmann must be given
credit too. Greenberg appreciates the dialectical nature of the medium to a
degree that most other critics can barely approach. We see the results in his
close criticism, such as the dense and brilliant “Pasted-paper Revolution”/”Collage”
article[35]
and in Greenberg’s highly effective workshop criticism in the studios of
numerous major artists.

In the end, his
philosophical sources confirmed in Greenberg an urge to respect the limits of
criticism as a discipline by not aiming for more precision than it can properly
offer. The question is, did Greenberg draw those limits correctly?

The dimensions of art criticism as such

Before
considering the weakness of Greenberg’s aesthetic position, it would be helpful
to lay the groundwork for considering how complete a critical practice his
aesthetics allowed. Just what would a complete critical practice include?

Art criticism is no mere
single activity. It is useful to view criticism as a set of activities,
although the early critics collectively—and perhaps the majority of
twentieth-century critics individually—may have engaged in only some of them.
While there seems to be no widespread agreement on the activities that might be
said to comprise “criticism,” for the sake of discussion I will argue that
there are at least six functions, or kinds of functions, that critics have at
various times seen as essential to their activity.

i. As Croce observed, art criticism has often
been “conceived... as a harsh and tyrannical pedagogue, who gives
capricious orders, imposes prohibitions, permits liberties.”[36]
That is, critics who view their function as primarily pedagogical may dictate
to the artists that they do this and not that.

ii. Croce observed that criticism has also often
been taken as inherently judgmental, and indeed its etymology points to this
function. In the Greek, Krites is a judge, one who can give an
authoritative opinion.

iii. The genetic phase of art criticism “is a
study of the factors that have shaped a work of art.”[37]
These factors can be either individual—personality and the personal history of
the artist—or environmental—the social milieu, cultural climate, etc. This
function could focus on the creative process itself.

iv. The “immanent phase of art criticism is a
study of the major features within the work of art itself:.... materials, form,
expression, and function,”[38]
but especially form. This third function is inherently descriptive and
encompasses a wide range of practice, from Modernism to early versions of
Semiotics.

v. Immanent criticism has often been extended
beyond description into the realm of interpretation. The interpretative critic
aims to find an encoded meaning within the work, which might be conscious or
unconscious, intended or otherwise. That meaning can be deemed by the critic as
any of: an archetypal image, a fundamental myth, a recurrent narrative
structure, a recurrent theme, a pattern of antimonies, and so on. This
function, then, encompasses the main activities of Jungian, semiotic and
structuralist criticism, and of many Marxists.

vi. Artistic judgments depend ultimately on some
set of fundamental beliefs and values, and Croce has argued that “art
criticism, when it is truly aesthetic or historical,… develops into criticism
of life” and adds, “This is seen in truly great critics.”[39]
Critics themselves have often thought this the case. Both Arnold and Ruskin
aimed their criticism at the very salvation of England. As Arnold saw it, “Modern
poetry can only subsist by its contents: by becoming a complete magister
vitae.”[40]
C.S. Lewis detected such a philosophical difference in his dispute with Leavis
over Paradise Lost: “It is not that I see different things when we look
at Paradise Lost. He sees and hates the very same that I see and love…. We
differ not about the nature of Milton’s poetry, but about the nature of man, or
even the nature of joy itself.”[41]
A few of the most ambitious critics do take into account this sixth function of
criticism, which I refer to as the “meta-critical” dimension.

Weaknesses in Greenberg’s aesthetics

This paper argues that there are four
problematic aspects to Greenberg’s aesthetic position. Greenberg’s philosophy
of art, as clear and powerful as it may seem, has a number of contradictions
and lacunae.

I. While it is not obvious that Greenberg was
aware of any internal inconsistencies in his practice, there are at least two
conflicting approaches to the aesthetic attitude in his oeuvre. One is
exemplified by his book on Miro (1948). In this first approach aesthetic
distance is a dynamic process of transformation of mental states, as seen in
Miro’s works from 1935-39, which Greenberg declared “his greatest height so far.”[42]
Examples would include Head of a Man (1935) and Still Life with Old
Shoe (1937). Greenberg argues that here “Miro sports with his fears... and
sportiveness implies the decorative.”[43]
At that time, during and just before the Spanish Civil War, Miro’s was a
decorativeness of felt necessity, in contrast with that of the later Miro, who
is gratuitously decorative and, Greenberg implies, lacks inner necessity. In
1948, then, Greenberg took content as a specifiable process, not as
unspecifiable, and had an implicit theory of creativity. Art is an act of
mental distancing, a kind of transcending, but not mere denial, and it emerges
in response to at least somewhat identifiable life experiences. Likewise he saw
the old masters, Delacroix, and the cubists too, as “dissolving... emotion into
the abstract elements of style.”[44]
This aspect of Greenberg’s earlier criticism, i.e., his dynamic concept of
aesthetic distance, has seldom been noticed; the exception is Donald Kuspit who
observed that in Greenberg’s criticism of the 1940s “When strong temperament
and intense emotion have to be mastered—in effect renounced... the aesthetic
transposition of such temperament and emotion” results in great art.[45]
By the time of the
“Counter-Avant-garde” article (1971) Greenberg stated this premise directly:
“art is an act of mental distancing,” [46] but by then the
creative process is lost to his analysis and the concept of distance is
diminished, undefined, generalized, in part because the critic has shifted his
attention from the particular situation of the artist to that of the viewer: “You
become relieved of, distanced from, your cares and concerns as a particular
individual coping with you particular existence”[47]
and relish instead “exalted cognitiveness”—with “nothing specific to know;”
thus “The pleasure of esthetic experience is the pleasure of consciousness: the
pleasure that it takes in itself.”[48]
To the later Greenberg, this is Kant’s “exalted informedness.”[49]

Thus the second tendency, pronounced in most of later
Greenberg, disdained psychological considerations and prioritized Kant as he
understood him and so incorporated some of the limitations of that great
philosopher’s aesthetics. I would argue that Kant did not specify fully enough either the nature or the limits of
disinterestedness.Within this second tendency in Greenberg’s criticism,
mental distance can still be an issue, but basically as a static state of mind
marked by detachment. Thus the emphasis falls on the reception of art to the
exclusion of how and why art is created by actual artists.

II.
Greenberg was embarrassed[50]
by his book on Miro and never took up its personal-genetic analysis again. Despite his interest in Croce, who did have a concern
for the genesis of art, Greenberg consistently neglected the sources for
artistic creativity. Hilton Kramer rightly observed that in Greenberg “Artists appear ... as anonymous inventors and
manipulators of form machines;” and “There is in ... [his] writing a fear of
the personal element in art, an embarrassment in the face of anything but the
formal and the historical.”[51]
Unlike his immediate predecessor within
modernist art criticism, Roger Fry, Greenberg has relatively little interest in
the persona of the artist and the sources of his creative impulses, so that his
criticism, both in the studio and on the page, with its heavy emphasis on the
finished work, could be charged with what I call the parthenogenetic fallacy.
The genetic function of art criticism is the null set in Greenberg after 1948.
He did acknowledge that “There is no good art without inspiration” but insisted
that “there is nothing to be said about” it because it is “a mystery,”[52]
despite the example of one of his favourite critics, Roger Fry, who believed
otherwise.

The reason for this failing may lie in Greenberg’s
excessive focus on Kant, his less thorough involvement with Croce, and his lack
of knowledge of psychological and psychoanalytic theories of art. Perhaps Greenberg was disinclined to be further
involved with Croce because that philosopher did not allow for degrees of
artistic merit. Croce maintained that “The beautiful does not possess degrees”
although ugliness does.[53]
Greenberg flatly rejected that idea: “it is the very nature of art to contain
infinite degrees of value.”[54]

III. There is a necessary place for
content/feeling in art and Kant did not adequately explain what it is—he had no
psychology to put it into perspective. A careless reading of Kant therefore
runs the risk of empty formalism. Greenberg’s was an incomplete version of both
Kant’s and Croce’s aesthetics, neglecting in particular the speculation of Kant
in the Fourth Moment of “Analytic of the Beautiful” that art “exemplifies a universal
rule one cannot state,” i.e., what I take to be Kant’s brief flirtation with
the General-Content Hypothesis later developed by such neo-Freudians as Hanna
Segal, where the General Content Hypothesis holds that there is some constant
in artistic expression, whatever the artist, whatever the medium, whatever the
time or place. When
Croce argued that art is liberating since feelings are contemplated and
therefore “resolved and transcended,”[55]
he offered a more serviceable opportunity for Greenberg to build on his insight
into Miro’s creative process. Croce said of the artist’s feelings, “By
objectifying them, he removes them from him and makes himself their superior”[56]
and “the feeling is altogether converted into images.”[57]
But Greenberg, or at least the later Greenberg, did not incorporate that
portion of Croce into his aesthetics, and the opportunity was lost. Bullough’s
seminal article on Psychical Distance was likewise not imported into
Greenberg’s aesthetics, although Greenberg did refer to it very late in his
career, however parenthetically.[58]
And despite his intense interest in psychoanalysis, neither was Hanna Segal’s
key work.[59]

Segal would have been a
particularly valuable addition to Greenberg’s sources in aesthetics, for she
defines art in terms of unconscious processes that are central to the
maturation of every human being. Segal applied the psycho-analytic theories of
Melanie Klein to argue that both the production and reception of art are an
adult recapitulation of that important process in the maturation of the child—unfortunately
labeled “mourning”—whereby the child comes to terms with his separateness from
his mother and his ambivalent feelings towards her. Segal’s model suggests a
number of grounds to support judgments of art, in particular, grounds for
separating less successful art from good art. All of those criteria are in the
realm of feeling and based on considerations of the maturity of the artistic
personality and the struggle of the human mind to come to terms with the
inevitable disappointments and frustrations of a lived life. Her model could
have been the basis for a meta-critical aspect of Greenberg’s criticism, as
they were for Adrian Stokes, one of the most brilliant of all twentieth-century
art critics. But Greenberg did not aim for meta-criticism. In fact I doubt he
had a concept of it.

I have argued that
Kant’s aside that the aesthetic “exemplifies a universal rule one cannot state” (section 18) could have
been another useful stimulus to a potential meta-criticism, but unfortunately
the implications are unclear. Section 21 makes the issue a harmony of the
cognitive powers and rejects psychological foundations. It is not obvious what
Kant’s harmony of the cognitive powers entails for the aesthetic or what in
1790 he would mean by psychology. By temperament Greenberg would not be
attracted to further speculation of this kind. In the hands of Roger Fry,
speculation into the General-Content Hypothesis led him to postulate his
concept of “the esthetic state of mind,” which he thought was characterized by
vitality, but with passivity at its root.[60]
That was an insight with suggestions of a meta-critical dimension to his
criticism: an appreciation of one of the basic conflicts of the human mind,
such as he brought to bear in his masterful book on Cézanne.[61]

IV. After he fell away from Marxism, Greenberg’s
aesthetics was not rooted in any general philosophy that might have been the
basis for a wider critical stance. Despite Trotskyite leanings in his youth,
the later Greenberg (Greenberg II) basically took the existing social and
political order for granted, and was a staunch supporter of the war in Viet Nam. And while he recommended psychoanalysis to numerous artists, he was strangely
immune to depth psychology’s contribution to our understanding of the basic
human condition, at least in his criticism. In the end, the value of art for
him is nothing more than “heightened cognitiveness-without-cognition”[62]

Conclusions

There is no gainsaying that Greenberg was one of
the greatest critics and that his greatness was considerably enhanced by his
involvement with aesthetics. And yet he could have done more, made his
criticism more complete. Perhaps Kuspit was correct to argue that Modernist
criticism commits what Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,[63]
that it never sees painting as a “solution to the problem of how to be in the
world.” One could read some of Greenberg’s most illuminating articles, and, as
insightful as they are, not get the sense that, as Croce put it, “the artist
must have a share in... the whole drama of human life.”[64]
David Smith said it very well: “There’s no such thing as truly abstract.
Man always has to work from his life.”[65]
He was not alone in that insight. Barnett Newman’s letter to the NY Times,
co-signed by Gottlieb and Rothko, observed, “There is no such thing as good
painting about nothing.” Greenberg of the 1940s and early 1950s—what I would
designate as Greenberg I—strove to incorporate an account of the role of
feeling in both the production and the reception of art. But, as Florence
Rubenfeld has observed,[66]
by the time Art and Culture was published in 1961, much of that effort
was edited out by the critic and not ever taken up again. If only Greenberg,
like Roger Fry, had been more sensitive to the human dimension of art and art
criticism! But perhaps it would be unwise to demand that a critic like
Greenberg, who gave us so very much, should have given even more.

[2] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago and London, 1962). While in the physical sciences
there are few paradigms at any one time, and competing paradigms cannot
co-exist for long, in art criticism there continues to be a wide number of
competing paradigms.

[13] Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, etc.; Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 97. All quotations from
Kant are taken from this source unless otherwise noted.

[14]Homemade Esthetics, op. cit., p. 111. In response to a question from the audience, Greenberg interpreted Kant as follows: “What he meant was, we are pretty much alike along general lines. And it is the general lines that come in play when we're developing our taste.”

[24]Ibid.
In later writings, Greenberg referred to content as “ineffable” and credited Suzanne Langer with the idea. (Homemade Esthetics, op. cit., p.
142.)

[25] Immanuel Kant, Analytic of the Beautiful from The Critique of Judgment with excerpts from Anthropology from a Pragmatic Viewpoint, Second Book, translated by Walter Cerf (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 46.

[29]
Contemporary critical theorists and practicing critics typically argue that an artistic
judgment “is probably prior temporally, and is prior logically, to the
particular observations the critic uses to support it.” (Colin Radford and
Sally Minogue, The Nature of Criticism, Sussex: The Harvester Press and
New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1981, p. 46). Philosophers such as Frank Cioffi
and Arnold Isenberg maintain that in critical arguments we begin with our
conclusions.

[35] “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” appeared in ARTnews, 57:5 (Sept., 1958), pp.46-49, -61. A substantially revised version of it was published as “Collage” in Art and Culture and dated 1959. Greenberg had
never been happy with the title provided by the editors of ARTnews.

[60] Roger Fry, “Some Questions in Aesthetics” in Transformations (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926), pp.1-43. Fry is not consistent as to exactly what he is discussing, the state of attention required by works of art of the audience or the emotional impact they produce.

[61] Roger Fry, Cézanne, A Study of His Development (London: Macmillan, 1927).